New Keyboard Doubles Typing Speed

Smartphones have come as a blessing but there are still a few who prefer the age old touch-and-type phones. What’s the main reason behind the preference? The presence of hardware buttons.While smartphones, with their plethora of apps have made life easy, some people find it increasingly difficult to tackle the touch-screens. There’s no satisfaction of the ‘click’ (not the sound but the feel). Also, while the hard keyboards enabled typing without looking at the screen, it is quite a difficult art to master in touch-screen phones. However, looks like the challenge of typing on a touch-screen phone will get much easier. Researches claim to have created a new keyboard for touch-screen devices that enables super-quick typing. The keyboard is not the traditional QWERTY board but instead supports a different format. Researchers are confident that the new keyboard improves the speed of typing by up to 34 percent!Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and colleagues from the University of St Andrews and Montana Tech have devised a new technique for making two-thumb typing easier and minimising the stress on thumbs. The new design changes the placement of alphabets and characters too.According to the new layout, the alphabets that are used more often are clubbed together. The keyboard will try and promote typing with a single thumb. According to researchers, “Experienced typists move their thumbs simultaneously: While one is typing, the other is approaching its next target. We derived a predictive model of this behaviour for the optimisation method.” The new keyboard will be called KALQ and in the keyboard all vowels expect for the letter ‘y’ will be placed to the right, assigned for the right thumb. Other alphabet keys along with numeric and special characters keys will be to the left. Also, with devices getting bigger, the current keyboard is getting more restrictive. The QWERTY keyboard requires typing with both thumbs and fingers of both hands. This makes it increasing difficult to hold a tablet in one hand and type with the other. Also, typing on a touch-screen device with a thumb is completely different from typing on your computer/laptop keyboard.According to research, it has been established that normal users using a QWERTY on a touchscreen device are limited to typing at a rate of around 20 words per minute, which is slow compared to the rates achieved on physical keyboards.The KALQ app is expected to increase the typing speed on touch-screen devices from the present 20 words per minute to 37 words per minute! Which is almost double! The app will initially be an Android app and is expected to roll out by the first week of May.